Honestly, I'd argue the Imperium are the 3rd most evil faction, with only Chaos and Drukhari being any worse and everyone else being tied or better
Orks and Tyranids don't count. One is a hivemind that only cares about hunger. Orks are a biological weapon. You can call war evil as a concept, but a gun or a tank have no morality as tools
Well then there's only five factions (Aeldari, Tau, Chaos, Drukhari, Imperium) and the Imperium can thus also be considered 3rd best (I'd say 2nd because the Aeldari, depending on the writing, can be really fucking stupid)
GW has forgotten about most things to be fair. Attention given to the blueberries and overpriced plastic toys are the only two constant in the life of this company.
Leagues ot Votann are the newest faction, and by proxy of that (and also GW being GW), they really don't have THAT much lore, and ATM they're essentially Deep Rock Galactic Dwarves but they're all bio-engineered clones that worship huge ancestor supercomputer AIs that hold all the memory of every dwarf but run on Windows Vista so they can barely operate after tens of thousands of years of server time.
So overall they're arguably one of the least evil factions.
The Votann only really resemble the squats in name, form, and basic lore. Since 40k was just Warhammer Fantasy in Space, the Squats were really just the wacky Sci-Fi take on Fantasy's Dwarfs that quickly fell behind as 40k quickly became much more independent from Fantasy.
Just take a quick comparison at the 40k Squat models and the modern Votann models, there's a very clear difference.
That's kind of my point. Pushes the Imperium more towards the evil end (not that the Necrons aren't also an empire xenociding the galaxy, they're just older).
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u/panteradelnorte 9h ago
Surprised there aren’t more “40K themed trope” comments in here.
“Good by virtue that the enemy is worse” is the Imperium to a tee (with the exception of the Tau).